A building that retains knowledge: The Natural Sciences Museum of Buenos Aires (II).

As I promised in the last post about the museum, I’m going to show you some creepy but interesting stuff I found. This is the Malacology room (let’s remember it’s the branch of science dedicated to mollusks). In here you can find many species, from those we know best like starfishs to those who we (at least I) didn’t know it existed, or maybe we just didn’t realize it. This room contains a large compilation of native freshwater, salty and terrestrial mollusks, with large infographics and explanations about the different uses that man gives them (from studies purposes to foodie ones).

There wasn't enough information on the label for me, so I wrote down the name of this creature and googled it later (specially for this post). So, it's supossed to be an Ascidean. The ascidians (Ascidiacea), commonly known as ascidians, are a class of animals belonging to the Urochordata subphylum. These animals are also known as marine jets, because they feed by entering water into their body through the pharynx, to expel through the atrial siphon once they have retained food. The filtering habit of these animals causes numerous contaminants to enter theirr body; Many of them can be toxic for embryonic, larval or adult forms. On the other hand, some species are used as indicators of water pollution They should be called SEA FILTERS right?

The collection includes material studied by important Argentine specialists. It is the most important invertebrate collection in Argentina and one of the most important collections of mollusks in Latin America. Today has more than 37,000 lots (most containing numerous individuals) of all types of invertebrates, except terrestrial arthropods. The mollusks are the main represented group, constituting more than 50% of the specimens. The main lines of research include the biology of the conservation of freshwater gastropods, reproduction of marine mollusks, ecology of benthic communities and the taxonomy of marine amphipods, terrestrial molluscs and bryozoans. The digitization of collection information is currently taking place.

Hope you putted some imagination to this and actually found this entertaining and educational. In the next posts I'll show you the rest of the rooms and exhibition, that in my personal opinion are the ones that are worth showing; the next room is full of bones but has nothing to do with dynosaurs, it's actually more recent and has some actual skelletons (not replicas).. But you'll have to wait for the next post to check it out.